ONE SMALL STEP FOR ME, ONE GIANT LEAP INTO PLACE CONSCIOUS TEACHING

My name is Erica Rogers and I’m a fourth-year Ph.D. student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. I’ve been teaching undergraduate courses for three years, and I find the work challenging and fulfilling. Lincoln has been my home since 1993 when I moved here with my husband, a troubled man originally from a small Nebraska town. We divorced in 1998, which I don’t regret (as I’m sure he doesn’t either). In 2001, I began my undergraduate studies at the university, entering first as a journalism major largely because it was the only college that would let me enroll with “academic deficiencies.”

I thought journalism was a good choice for me because I had once hoped to make my daily bread writing. In the fall of my junior year, however, after a school-sponsored trip to Paris and documentary project, I realized I could not make a career in journalism and mass media as I had hoped. The Golden Era of news, the one with Walter Cronkite, a young and eager Ted Koppel, with Mike Wallace and Dan Rather, had faded to a gilded memory. The news practices that had encouraged and emboldened me to consider a life as a “watchdog of government” and civic participant had faded to news-for-profit practices. It was clear to me in the fall of 2004 that print media was an endangered species. I was devastated.

That same fall, however, I took a course, “ENGL 376: Rhetoric and Argument in Society” facilitated by Dr. Chris Gallagher. Working in that class, I discovered my passion for language, rhetoric, and education. I consider it a pivotal moment in my inquiry process, one that led me to reconsider my purpose and potential as a student. I began to try on the idea of becoming a professor, a life-long learner and teacher. By the end of the course, with a new direction and sense of excitement, I changed my major to English. I’ve never regretted that journalism divorce either.

Today, I live in a two-bedroom, two-bath student family housing apartment on the fringe of campus. From my living room, I can watch the reconstruction and redesign of the old Whittier Building as it transforms from being the region’s first middle school to a university childcare and research center. There’s an interesting geo-thermal project underway, one that involves the parking lot as a pad for geo-thermal and alternative energy. You can read more about that by clicking: Whittier. I often sit on my balcony and watch the redefinition of space and purpose, the revision of structure and architectural expression and marvel at mankind’s desire to rework and retool spaces.

But then, I’m a gigantic nerd, colossally cerebral and geeky.

The living spaces I occupy feel temporary, provisional. So long as I am a student, I can live here with my daughter. White walls and industrial-grade carpet have inspired me as an artist and painter. My palette is now primary colors, the brighter the better, and my murals and portraits work within the unruly hues of bold expression. I have become a cartoonist, working with a black and white palette, because cartooning relies on iconic symbols and previously signified meanings. I'll post cartoon samples of my main cartoon, "Captain Inquiry," in the near future.

To cartoon well, and to convey or change meaning, one must be well-versed in contemporary meanings and language use, the icons common in culture and the ways in which the world is defined by others. So while working on space and place, I’m also working with art and visual theory, particularly the work by Scout McCloud. To read more about him, click Scott McCloud.

This Scott McCloud lecture is particularly interesting to me:



I’m currently cartooning one-sheet cartoons that “situate the texts” of the readings I’ve assigned my “Writing and Communities” students in ENGL 254. We’re working with both traditional and graphic novels and memoirs this semester to complicate our sense of story, the signifier and the signified, and what it means to write. As I finish those cartoons, I’ll post them on this blog. I’m really excited about this work.

I began my intellectual inquiry into spatial theory a few years ago, relying heavily on the work of Edward Soja. This excerpt from a BBC special was particularly helpful in helping me to think about space and place:

Eward Soja and The Postmodern City



I have a teaching blog I use to “make my pedagogies visible” to my students. I have added concepts and ideas, resources and textual mentors to the blog to track my own progression as I work on my Ph.D. and sense of teaching. If you want to see it, you can find it at www.thirdspacing.blogspot.com or click on the link in the margin of this blog. I haven’t added anything new in far too long, so I’m hoping to put some new stuff up this semester before I lose my sense of what I’m working with this year.

This weekend, I think I’ll take my camera out and try to capture my sense of place as I do my regular weekend activities. We’ll see how that goes. I’m looking forward to working with the seminar scholars and the instructors, and I hope to bring a more focused sense of place and space into my teaching practices as I learn with and from you.